


you cry all alone an innocent call

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Not Beta Read, Spoilers, Spoilers for Episode: The Day of the Doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-26
Updated: 2013-11-26
Packaged: 2018-01-02 16:13:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1058893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t do erasing, I am an archaeologist.”</p><p>Everybody lived. Not everything.<br/>A great joy came at a great cost.</p><p>Spoilers for The Day of The Doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you cry all alone an innocent call

**Author's Note:**

> A quick, angsty fix-it for the gathering of all the Doctors in the Special.
> 
> Title from _Kill and Run_ by Sia

“I hate you.” He doesn’t quip back his usual reply and a wave of shivers rolls up her back, long the spine, catching her at the back of the skull, like a puncture.

He nods silently, eyes hooded.

She jerks forward, refrains from seeking his hands, dead weight at his sides. It’s a natural interruption of movement; she stops before touching him. She can’t.

“How do you know it was me?” She rasps, her own voice a mystery of syllables and clicks. Not hers. She should refuse and run, stop time. She has done it before. “I won’t do it.”

She can see his hair only, the birth of his forehead with the familiar scar shining under the strands. And lines, so much more lines.

_He didn’t ask when it was for her._

“You will.” Not actual words, but a strain on the voice it seems. “You already did.”

She shakes her head.

“I don’t do erasing, I am an archaeologist.”

“River.” His eyes snap open as he calls her, pleading. He does not try to reach out a hand.

“Don’t ask.”

“Please.”

They skitter for a minute in their words, against each other, against known and unknown histories, spoilers and lapses. They seek words, and fail. Find hands bound in marriage, and covering faces, like receptacles for loss.

There is nothing he could say that will convince her he has no choice. She simply knows it is because he trusts her. And that, he chose to do a long time ago.

“I need you to tell them to go. You know all of my faces. And I need something neater than converging timelines to scrub my mind clean. I don’t trust time.”

_But he trusts her._

She closes her eyes, letting panic overflow her thoughts before answering and regretting.

He asks her.

When he was there at the orphanage, at the beach.

She was left hanging between panic and loss, so many times, unable to recall what she had just done.

_Don’t let me do that to you._

She contemplates the desk, covered in notes for her next expedition on a sealed planet called the Library. His eyes pass the notes and close briefly. He trembles and she wonders.

In Darillium already. Again, here.

 _Spoilers_ , she guesses.

“I don’t ask you to erase my personal History. I ask you to preserve it, to curate.” He pauses, his hand extending and skimming over the photos, the sheets. He draws in a breath, sharply and she shoots him an inquisitive look that escapes his attention. “Another secret. That you will have to carve out of my mind.” He lifts his head, just barely, and his eyes, slowly. As if landing on her as gently as he could. “Yes.” He murmurs.

She folds her arms on her chest, trying to hold, to preserve indeed. The sanity she had left.

But Time. Always Time. She knows the rules.

“What do I do?”

He smiles fondly, absent.

“What you’ve always done.” His voice is strangely steady; he believes in what he can muster for her, to soften the blow. “Be an archaeologist, a curator.”

They fall into silence. A silence where she goes somewhere and he at the other end of the world. Worlds apart in the same room. Darillium and his presence, how they were in silence, then. He doesn’t see her now.

Maybe she will drug herself to forget this day once this is over.

Before long, his face performs a minute mish-mash of expressions; surprise and realisation and a flash of hatred, like a gutting knife. She leans in, hands on the desk.

So close, his hands are suspended over the documents. They fly to his face and comb back a strand of hair from his face. Stunned face.

“River, you are an archaeologist.” He gulps. “You didn’t show surprise when I asked. You knew all along.”

Her tongue tastes salt on her lips, and a remnant of coffee, but all she can think of is Darillium. Her fingers flutter there.

“I knew of echoes, of stories. Of course, when you disappear without a trace, it leaves an absence.” She starts carefully, watching his face with great ease. A Doctor this old is a master in masks. A tremor of panic just above the lips, right in the dip under his nose. “You can do only so much with a negative presence. The Daleks within range had all been blasted by a tremendous wave; few others were too far away to witness what happened. Your account of the last days was the only one. And it was believed.”

She nods for nothing. The vanity of her speech weighs her down like goo. It is lies and she knows it. Lies which she will knit for him. Across time and brain connections.

“The historians all assumed you managed to escape the wave. After all no one could explain what the Timelock was exactly, its technology, its proper use. No Time Lords left. They didn’t want to search further.”

She swallows with difficulty, her eyes set to his ruined face. There were no more emotions.

Scrubbed clean. What he expects from her.

_Bastard._

“The civilisation that had created such a dangerous weapon had destroyed itself,“ she continues, like an echo of a course she gave long before, but forgotten. And rewritten. “And saved the Universe from the need of such weapon. It was enough for most of them. The Universe was raw with fire…”

His brow silences her.

“I know all the lines.” His hands are hung on the lapels of his jacket and she has half a mind to laugh at the echo. “That’s History.”

“And that’s how it has been for you all these years.” She treads cautiously. Her tone has curbed to a confession, not a plea. “You believed it. I won’t be the one to cause you that grief.”

He looks up from the vague point he was staring at and their eyes lock onto each other.

The instant she uses the argument she knew she would accept. As well as he did. They hurt each other. Constantly. Durably. Time Lords don’t age. Not really. They let pain carve paths on their skin in the shape of wrinkles.

And the Doctor was old.

“Would you change the Silence?” He adds simply. Old, definitely, and he has lost all his pleas for forgiveness. “Kovarian? Your parents?”

She lifts her shoulders, a poor grin on the face, powerless.

“I don’t want to die.”

They look at each other in silence and he edges closer to her, round the desk, finally taking an elbow and drawing her closer to him. She sinks into his chest. Unable to find him. The Darillium Doctor.

Still, she has him.

“River, I ask you because it is vital I don’t remember.” He blows in her ear. “So that Gallifrey still burns in my head.”

She sighs heavily, battered. There is really nothing she can do.

“So that you spend four centuries believing everybody died by your hands.”

He drops a kiss on the top of her head and chants:

“So that not one line can be rewritten.”

 ***

That night, when she comes home, back to her cottage, she’s perfectly empty. She must have travelled back thousands of years in a day to bring him elation and kiss him to oblivion. To retrieve almost chirurgically that blissful moment above Gallifrey, where thirteen TARDIS answered to her call, when everybody lived.

He can almost dream her between companions and enemies to drop notes he cannot recall, lost to time, and later drag him to sleep, just after Gallifrey was saved. He slept while Gallifrey lived.

He even dreams she was there, inside each TARDIS, watching. Except he knows she was not. Years ago, she told him he did not need to bring her there, in his memories from Gallifrey. Because it was his. He needed to cling to something that was completely and perfectly his. Like she needed to have Leadworth and Mels for herself.

When he finds her in her room, she is sleeping.

Not a tear on her cheek, she left traces where she could, on the pillow, clobbered and in need of a little padding.

He edges close to her in the dark. She fell asleep with her clothes on, a dark specimen of her battledress from Utah. He wonders if she changes for each incarnation, he wonders how he felt her lips on his, if she had to dose Jamie because he surprised them, he wonders if she…

But those are memories lost.

_Forever._

He sighs and gently, takes off her belt, slides her trousers off and when she rolls on her stomach, he decides to relinquish his task. He pulls the cover on her reclining form and sits by her side, watching her face in sleep. Upset features, curled up fists. There is no sweat on her temples, but dust. Her breathing is arrhythmic, a little too disturbed; on her nightstand is the squareness gun.

“I’m sorry, my love,” he whispers and he takes hold of her head, thumbs on her cheekbones as his fingers brush the hollow of her forehead. He feels like chocking and going away and leaving her with her memories.

Her body jerks as he tries to focus, closing his eyes; if she wakes up in the process, he will not survive the pain of seeing her eyes, confused, hurt, _forgetting_.

He senses her trembling as she mentally struggles to disentangle herself from her dream and defend herself. Perhaps, recognising the intruder. He squeezes his eyes even more, working harder, cutting and threading, and oh, he doesn’t want her to see the seams, not one stich, inside her already maimed skull. He never did notice about his past selves.

It must have been her. All those ten times. Seamless work.

She progressively stills, as he retrieves the last remnants of the day from her memory.

When he opens his eyes, his vision is blurry.

_Like impacted with her vast mind._

She breathes normally, calmly, the furrow has gone. He almost cries, for a second decides he hates her for doing what she did, for doing so that he could love her still and more and all the others who came after that day on Gallifrey, for being loved to the point he did what he hated most, to her.

He loves her enough to hurt her in such a manner. As she did.

He consoles himself, petrified, in knowing, so close to the end, she was robbed of little. He guesses.

_The Doctor lies._

He is about to drag himself up and out, when he senses on his wrist her hand. She is still sleeping.

He should go. The last time she saw him was Darillium, not here. He did rewrite his story enough today.

Unless it is not a rewrite. _But a secret._

None of them are innocent in this game.

He gives in and rolls by her side, nestling against her side. Her breathing is so maddeningly slow, her hand so small in his. Hand for needles. And lace of memories. He surveys, lost.

Like a thief caught in the beauty of the palace he was supposed to rob.

Her hand is still in his. It’s a loose, feather-light, sleep-ridden hold, no stronger than the dream on her lids.

_But strong enough._


End file.
